Privacy
Demagogy
*BOO* Reality
I don't care what you want or like. I'm just talking about reality. Reality is Google knows more about what you want today than your mother or wife. Even if you don't use Google, Gmail, Google+ or anything from Google Corporation. Just by visiting CN you're logged into Google's database. (CN HTML contains Google Analytics - the most used website analytics tool). And I'm not even talking about OS, cookies or malware here.
So if you want to keep raging about ideals and using demagogy, go ahead. The fact still remains most ads you see today in your browser are customized for you. People using websites are a commodity website owners sell to advertisers. You're a product. Congrats.
The fact remains that you aren't arguing me, but rather some imagined construct you've created to make things easier for yourself. You can throw in as much snark and what I hesitate to call "wit" to try obfuscating that and your myriad other fallacies, but I'm not going to suddenly become stupid and fail to catch what you're doing.
It's amusing how you've tried desperately to drag the discussion away from PRISM, the NSA, and government surveillance and onto corporations. Almost as if you've realized you have no ground to stand on are are flailing for anything to divert attention from valid concerns. You have repeatedly cherry-picked, straw manned, and appealed to ridicule but have failed to make anything resembling a legitimate case.
Alyster is correct: the primary threat to security is (as it always has been) applications, not operating systems. However, operating systems bundle so many applications these days that people confuse the two.
Facebook has now started to sell information about where its users walk for use by marketing people. They are probably the single biggest threat. Uninstalling the Facebook app on your iOS/Android can stop that crap at least.
Has been, yes, which is why which applications we use and how we use them has been an important part of maintaining control of our privacy. Now however we have an OS being at least as intrusive and nosy, if not moreso. Does this make it impossible to protect your privacy? No. It just means you now have to lump in operating systems with the list of things to remain cognizant of.
Edited by Shokkou, 26 November 2015 - 02:12 PM.